In “Me and the Main,” a scintillating blues harp soundtracks a pointless round disagreement with an officious Boomer as as to whether the Queen’s military is the place one goes to study to be a person. The place does one go to study to be a person? Or to study something, for that matter? The sins of the daddy are cheerfully sloughed off on the son. “All of the others took medicine,” Murdoch sings of the previous generations, turned censorious of their dotage. “They’re taking it out on us.” They nonetheless are to today.
The album’s title observe and centerpiece is a five-minute-twenty-second sequence of good, steel-guitar abetted snapshots of doomed characters adrift in religious disaster, searching for nourishment from spiritual establishments that site visitors largely in corrupt predation and outdated ritual. Throughout there may be the pre-Brexit feeling of Potemkin establishments of church and state, misplaced someplace within the deafening reverberations of historical past, inadequate to fulfill the bodily and psychic wants of a youthful technology:
“Hillary went to the Catholic church as a result of she wished data
The vicar or no matter took her to 1 facet and gave her affirmation
St. Theresa’s calling her
The church up on the hill is wanting beautiful
But it surely didn’t curiosity
The one factor she desires to know
Is how and why and when and the place to go
How and why and when and the place to observe”
At occasions, critics have interpreted Murdoch’s songs as compositionally easy—a spare edifice round which to hold his tales and aphorisms, with backing crew offering their baroque however down-home orchestral assist. I think this has one thing to do with their nominal relationship to the “twee” motion, a selected form of aggressive guilelessness that ran by Scotland’s Postcard Information and Olympia, Washington’s Ok label. These sorts of data—Talulah Gosh and Beat Taking place—tended to the lo-fi and amateurish as some extent of pleasure. Little doubt, a few of that filtered by to Murdoch, but it surely didn’t emerge in simplicity of association. Certainly, the thorniest of Murdoch’s tunes right here—the galvanizing keep-yourself-safe “Like Dylan within the Motion pictures” or the passive-aggressive devotional “Mayfly”—are as delightfully and compositionally troublesome as your common Todd Rundgren music.
In his late 20s on the time, Murdoch was commencing a staggering scorching streak that might final roughly a decade. A pair Belle and Sebastian LPs throughout this stretch would undergo from the choice to delegate a number of songs to sundry bandmates, significantly 2000’s uneven Fold Your Palms Youngster, You Stroll Like a Peasant, which shines on Murdoch’s materials and is significantly diminished by lesser contributions by Stevie Jackson, Isobel Campbell, and Sarah Martin. Who is aware of the explanations for this selection—band dynamics are a psychedelic kaleidoscope of competing imperatives—however regardless of the case, by 2003’s Pricey Disaster Waitress, Murdoch had been largely restored to artistic primacy, on each that file and The Life Pursuit. Such a decade-long streak is traditionally uncommon. Sly Stone from 1967 to 1976. Joni Mitchell from 1968 to 1977. Dylan, a few completely different occasions. Anyway, If You’re Feeling Sinister launched the band right into a rarified air from which it could not quickly descend. Thirty years later, the group has developed into the very kind of communal establishment and devoted cult that Murdoch dared dream into actuality.
After all the bone-deep hooks, ribald jokes, and meticulous world-building, If You’re Feeling Sinister ends on the kind of galvanizing grace observe that used to return so simply to Morrissey, earlier than his hardwired paranoia lastly overtook his vaulting compassion. With its lilting, sing-song development and vaguely goofy brass interlude, “Judy and the Dream of Horses” is a sweet-natured mash observe to a bookish teenage insurgent, the kind who’s equally taken with S&M and Bible research, who perhaps desires to know the way and why and when and the place to observe. Don’t observe, Murdoch appears to inform her: Lead.
Extra analysis by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.
